Many industrial marketers are hesitant to focus on the digital channels. Here is evidence that waiting may be hazardous to your business

I wrote a review and summary of GlobalSpec’s 2013 Trends in Industrial Marketing on this blog in November of 2013. GlobalSpec’s survey summarized what many of us know already. Most industrial marketers are moving budget dollars towards digital and the most effective digital strategies are multi-channel, including the strong presence of social media and content marketing.

In the November post, I was amazed to find there was no mention of industrial branding and the need for it in The Age of Google.

Many industrial marketers are hesitant to launch an industrial blog because they fail to see an ROI. Let us examine the ROI potential of your company’s blog.

Speaking from experience here.

Blogging is an expensive and time-consuming marketing effort. It is not an exercise in creativity. Blogging will not hatch a bunch of Ernest Hemingway’s. A blog is not deployed to add more content to your web site. It is not for giving out tons of helpful information.

Although your industrial blog may do all of the above… it really is about lead generation.

Like other sales & marketing efforts, you need to know the potential ROI from your creative, time-consuming efforts. If you are a junior marketing person, this exercise is important to demonstrate ROI to gain support from management.

Can you really calculate ROI from your industrial blog? You bet.

Let us take a recent project we are working on for a B2B manufacturer & calculate the ROI. For all the number geeks out there, these numbers are not exact, but they are realistic. Based on real conversations with the customer and my own knowledge, ROIs such these are achievable.

Industrial marketers are beginning to realize the power of the web. The problem is they are missing opportunities by letting in-house amateurs develop websites & strategies.

I think we can all agree that your website is now your most valuable and most customer-facing marketing asset…right?

Then why does your industrial website and its home page look awkward, amateurish and unprofessional? Some websites may even look terrific but they fail to reach their true potential as a lead generation machine.

Industrial marketers invest billions on their websites and digital marketing efforts, yet an amazing 90% of the web sites I have analyzed, using various grading software and my own experience, fail. The primary ranking software I use is HubSpot’s Marketing Grader. Marketing Grader takes a holistic approach to digital marketing, less focused on keywords. (The new paradigm based in Google’s recent algorithm updates) In the past, I have used Raven, which takes a different approach and focuses entirely on keyword ranking.

“The real problem isn’t funding to do something new, but to get people to stop doing what isn’t working”